The first one would be conflict of interest! But what is conflict of interest? It is when you’re interviewing or reporting about somebody you have contact with. It’s like interviewing your friends, family members or even people you do not like basically, people who you know. But so what if you know them? Conflict of interest is when you interview them and start doing things that compromise objectivity in the reporting truth.

For example, you are reporting about a recent case about theft and it so happens that the victim is your highschool bestfriend. Since it’s your highschool bestfriend, you’ll probably side with him or her and make it seem that your highschool bestfriend is definitely innocent and have no faults in this case even though it may not be true. You’’ll do your best to report good stuff about your highschool bestfriend and may even bring down the accused which is pushing away the truth. This is known as conflict of interest.

So lets move on to the second ethical dilemmas journalists face!

The second one is none other than Invasion of privacy. Just by the 3 words you probably can guess what it is all about. As a journalist, you’ll have to respect people and know when to not cross the line which could invade into people privacy. You’ll have to get your information the legal way and not invade into people privacy just so you can get the ‘juiciest’ news. The consequences of Invasion of privacy can be very deadly as you’ll probably get sued by the victim and be criticised by the public for not knowing simple and basic rules of being a journalist

For example, you are in charge of interviewing a celebrity and rumors has been said that she was getting married to a guy 10 years younger than her. Of course you interview her however she chooses to not give any comments. Instead of stopping there, you invade into her privacy by following her home secretly and peeping into her window just so you can get a picture of her and her secret boyfriend who she was going to marry. Such things like that do happen in real life, most of it done by the paparazzi themselves, which has received many criticisms for their lack of respect in people’s privacy.

Moving on to the last one!

The last one is known as being bias. Being a journalist, you need to be fair and impartial as possible. Ever issue has more than one side, it is your job to get both sides to be represented as much as possible. Just because you are bias to one of the parties, it is absolutely wrong to cover more of their area and cover very little on the other party. It is actually obvious when journalists are bias to one of the parties thus the consequences will also not be pleasant when the public starts to question the reports written by all the journalists in that company

Just to give a short example, it is the election period and Group A is going against Group B. You were given the task to interview both of the parties and update on the current news affair concerning the election. Just because you liked and voted for Group A, you choose to cover more on Group A’s news affairs and make them sound interesting and as for Group B, you cover very little and they only appear at a small section on the page of the news paper compared to Group A. This is showing bias-ness which is very inappropriate in my perspective as I think that as journalists, it is important to be professional and have equality.